The Center for Legal Information of ECUPL is committed to meeting the needs for legal literature resources in the national and regional strategies, such as the rule of law in China, the building of "the Four Centers" and the Technology Incubation Center in Shanghai. Drawing on the rich resources of Chinese and foreign legal literature and experience at ECUPL, the Center intends to provide a full range of reliable multi-module service to users at home and abroad, including inquiry, borrowing, consulting, and training in the Chinese and foreign legal literature resources. Adhering to the concepts of digital, professional, convenient and collaborative service as well as opening and sharing, the Center is devoted to building an “Internet plus” platform of legal literature information service through integrating and mining legal literature resources with the help of the Internet and other modern information technology.

Adhering to characteristic collection and classified management of various resources, the Center features a collection of digitalized and integrated foreign and Republic of China legal information. At present, the Center has 2.33 million copies of paper literature, over 1500 kinds of Chinese and foreign newspapers and periodicals in Chinese, English, German, France, Japan, Russian and other languages. The Center also has 2.06 million e-books in Chinese and foreign languages and 86 databases, which include the digital resources of all the legal information in Chinese and the major legal information in foreign languages.

Drawing on its rich Chinese and foreign legal information resources and legal talents, and with the aid of advanced professional tools, the Center provides highly customized information mining and analysis services, based on factual data and literature. It also provides high value-added knowledge information as well as services like information push, expert guidance, collaborative innovation and interaction, not limited by time and space.

Initially, the Center will emphasis developing a series of distinctive thematic databases to meet the special demands of legal information resources of the Belt and Road Initiative, Shanghai Pilot Free Trade Zone and Technology Incubation Center. The topics of thematic database include: the Belt and Road Initiative, Pilot Free Trade Zone, the protection of intellectual property rights, the typical international organizations (such as UN, WTO, WIPO), civil law system(Germany), Anglo-American law system(United States) and the proof of foreign law.

The Center has recently undertaken a number of research projects, including Improvement and Construction of System of Laws and Regulations Concerning Foreign Affairs, The Belt and Road National Legal System, Mexico Land Transport Law, Japanese International Private Law Concerning Foreign Marriage and Family, Government’s Collection and Use of Public Information and Protection of Personal Rights, German Political Party Law and Russian Federation Political Party Law, Judicial Reform of Pilot Free Trade Zone, United States Foreign Investment Law, Experience and Practice of Commercial Arbitration in Shanghai Pilot Free Trade Zone, P2P Credit Supervision, Internet Crowd-funding, Protection Mechanism of Consumer Rights and International Collaboration Mechanism in Cross-border E-commerce, Reform of Commercial Registration System, Computer Forensics and Cybercrime with Cloud-based Technology etc.

In addition, the staff of the Center takes the initiative to meet the needs of ECUPL’s Institute of China Free Trade Zone Law by publishing 37 information briefings in succession, containing news, media review and frontier research relating to free trade zones nationwide. The briefings have been issued monthly and sent to over 40 politicians, scholars and practitioners across the country. Through developing a social service platform of high quality by converting the research results into high-level decision-making advice, the staff of the Center are also actively involved in ECUPL Center for Proof of Foreign Law, a high level think tank established with the cooperation of International law subjects of ECUPL and judiciary and arbitration departments.

Professor He Xiaoyong, the Director of the ECUPL Library and the Executive Vice Dean of the ECUPL Institute of China Free Trade Zone Law, is appointed as the Director of the Center.